A blog about everything and anything...but mostly science, philosophy and other stuff

Friday, January 1, 2016

Why I'd take science over religion any day

Televangelists perform seemingly
modern miracles right in front of our eyes, so to speak. Advanced space
telescopes look into deep space to find amazingly earth-like planets all over
the galaxy.

These two are claims that
profoundly engage us as humans and both compel us to make the most important of
life's decisions: what to believe. What one believes greatly impacts one's behaviour
and personality; basically one's worldview. But how does one decide which one
is the correct fact?

Well, to avoid any conflict one
may simply accept both, that some men and women can cure people with little
more than prayer, and that there are indeed many other planets like ours in the
Milky Way galaxy. For the curious, both these disciplines accommodate those who
wish to "prove" or further investigate these "facts". For
the first one, only your faith is asked of you, and the other one, science is
offered as a truth-finding tool.

For intermediate truth-seekers,
the televangelist asks that you call in and receive the prayer and the miracle
that comes with it. While the organization responsible for the discovery of a
new planet attaches an article explaining how the discovery was made. If one is
still not convinced of the validity of either claim, then you are more than
welcome to take the academic route. Theology is preferred for the first claim
but science (and engineering) is the taken for the second claim.

In theology one is told, by
authority that miracles do happen and that prayer does change the physical laws
of the universe and the proof of it can be found in the authority of holy books
and past philosophers (who conform to such ideas). In science however, one is
taught to never accept any idea unless it has been proven independently
countless times, and even then, one is taught to try as they may to disprove
accepted ideas to test their strength and validity in reality.

In summary, in religion you are
told to believe what you are told (and here I transcend all levels of theology
to the highest authority who will basically tell you to believe what you are
told), and in science you are told to go investigate it yourself and you are
taught methods that will lead you to the truth of a physical reality.

For these reasons, I am obsessed
with the communication of science, and I am very much against the proliferation
of religion as it counteracts any progress I make in communicating methods for
truth-finding.

I have made it a principle of
mine to vanquish misinformation and vow everyday not to accommodate alternative
means of truth-finding that are in fact false and more than likely lead to
great conflicts as we do away with our desire for the honest truth, the
physical reality of the universe.

So, two amazing things happen: a
miracle on television with a man or woman praying, and a miracle in another solar
system with a large team of scientists and engineers sciencing (sic).

1 comment:

truth be told in the absence of religion we would have an ocean of knowledge,and all that religion has done is hold back the progress and advancement in sciences.untill we as africans learn to see science as a solution to problems and prayer as an obsticle to solving those problems,can it be that we will rise to new heights as a continent.